Before 2015, for most people outside the Arab region or those who were neither Jewish nor Arab, Israel-Palestinian conflict was a knotty ethno-religious dispute over chunks of land with too many exotic place-names and a jumble of claims and counter-claims. Then Netflix brought it right into the bedrooms across the world, and told it as a story of a dysfunctional Israeli undercover commando who comes out of retirement to hunt for a Palestinian terrorist he believed he had killed.
Fauda, which is Arabic for chaos, premiered as a TV series on Netflix in 2015, developed by Avi Issacharoff and lead actor Lior Raz, who was as real in his role of the protagonist as the story the series told. In its stylised action, breathless suspense, eerie intrigue and lyrical portrayal of revenge and loss, Fauda gave a face to the conflict. In its four seasons, Fauda showed how Israel-Palestine conflict is not just a war of ideologies or a battle for land but also a story of husbands, wives, parents, children, siblings and lovers.
Many also saw Fauda as Israeli propaganda dressed up as a racy thriller. But Fauda's popularity, even in Arab countries where people have deep animus for Israel, underlined its stark realism. After last week's Hamas attack on Israel, many would be interpreting the incidents through the Fauda lens.
Raz, who co-produced and co-wrote the series while also playing the lead role of Israeli agent Doron Kabilio, has volunteered in the ongoing war against Hamas and joined the Brothers in Arms, a group fighting alongside Israel. He shared a video in which he is seen taking shelter behind a wall as rockets explode in the sky.
Raz, from agent to actor
Raz, whose father worked in Israeli internal security service Shin Bet, grew up in Jerusalem and spoke fluent Hebrew and Arabic. He too joined Israel Defense Forces and became a commando in the elite undercover counter-terrorism unit known as Sayeret Duvdevan where he served for a few years, That was when a Palestinian Arab stabbed his girlfriend to death with a knife in Jerusalem. Nearly a decade later, the murderer was released from jail in a prison swap, an incident that reflects in the story of Fauda which mixes love, violence and revenge in a heady script.
After few years of working as an elite undercover counter-terrorism agent, Raz moved to the US where he was hired by a security agency as a bodyguard of Hollywood star Arnold Schwarzenegger. That's how Raz the commando got on the way to become Raz the actor. After working with Schwarzenegger, Raz returned to Israel in 1995 and enrolled in a drama school. Nearly a decade later, after acting in several films and TV dramas, Raz wrote and produced Fauda along with journalist Avi Issacharoff.
Raz, who had suffered from PTSD, said writing the script for Fauda was akin to therapy for him.
The reel and the real
Fauda was critically acclaimed for its realism. Last week's Hamas attack on Israel and Israel's resolute response can make viewers of Fauda appreciate how close the TV series was to reality. The unhinged commando Doron, who infilitrates a suicide bombing operation, and the self-perpetuating violence of Palestinian militants that has broken free of any imperative of justice blur the boundaries of right and wrong and portray precisely in a humanised idiom what appears so tangled in news and op-eds.
Despite Fauda showing things from an Israeli perpsective, it did not paint Palestinians as a monolithic, homohenous group of people. It tried to present the complexity of a resistence movement that spans from helpless victims to mindless terrorists.
“We gave a face to the other side,” Raz had said in an interview to The Wrap. “We show the complexity of the conflict to the point where the viewer doesn’t know how to feel anymore.”
“I’ve gotten fan mail from people in Dubai,” he said. “Muslims from all over the world have told us how much they love the show.”
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